The second part of my day in Xochilmilco was visiting the
Museo Dolores Olmeda. For the first
part, taking a gondola on the canals, see Part I.
The backstory to this visit is that my hostel in Coyoacán is
literally two blocks from the Museo Frida Khalo, the “Casa Azul” where the
famous painter lived and died. I have
tried several times to get in, but each time I went the line was at least a
block long.
In Xochimilco, however, is a 16th-centurty hacienda that was
home to Dolores Olmeda, a wealthy socialite, patron of the arts, and major
collector of works by both Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera. After our morning on the canals, Adrian and
Sarah and I went to take it in. It was
something of a bizarre scene.
Statue of Dolores Olmeda on the museum grounds
The first oddity was the by now usual effect in which you
squeeze through Mexico City’s loud, crowded, dirty urban streets, pass through
some sort of gate, and are transported into an aristocratic otherworld of
expansive lawns, cypress trees, and, at the end of a long promenade, a
full-fledged castle that was someone’s private home. It was absolutely gorgeous.
On a beautiful afternoon like we had, it was almost a shame
to go indoors into the museum. But of
course we did. The first rooms you enter
are for the Frida Khalo works. I’ve
never been that much of a fan of Frida’s work; certainly I stand outside the
enormous cult that has arisen around, mainly, her body of self-portraits;
nevertheless, I found the pieces they had quite powerful, including many
portraits she did of other people. I
declined to pay the fee to take photos, but I snuck one in of perhaps the most
cult-like exhibit: her clothes.
It was a little difficult being in the Frida rooms, not so
much from the visual, textual, and symbolic evocations of the painter’s
constant pain (she was badly injured in a traffic accident at age 18), though indeed
that had its sorrowing effect, as from the mundane interference of the
paintings’ proximity sensors, which seemed to be tuned to a sensitivity
matching Frida’s own and which every few seconds emitted a series of four loud,
piercing shrieks. I felt sorry for the
guards who had to live with that all day long.
The museum contained also—in fact was in the main dedicated
to—Diego Rivera’s works, small and (very) large, interspersed with pieces from
his enormous collection of pre-columbian art.
We walked through several rooms of these, and the interspersing itself
formed an oddity; one must really, I think, contemplate either an Aztec statutette or
a huge mural depicting a socialist allegory of New York City; to attempt both
at once is to rather short-circuit the museum-going brain. Did I really then see, for an instant, a
whole room storing huge cloth-and-plaster Day-of-the-Dead figures with skeleton
heads? My favorite room, actually, was
the single quiet one devoted to Pablo O’Higgins drawings; I wish I had cheated
on another photo here, but it was small, brightly-lit, and guarded.
But it was back outdoors, with my camera reset for sunlight,
that the museum’s bizarre aspects were most famously in evidence. Patroness Olmeda loved (among many things) both
peacocks and a breed of black hairless dog called a Xoloiztcuintle, and she provided
for their continued breeding in her will, with the result that the lovely grounds
and gardens of the hacienda are idiosyncratically filled with both species.
The total combination is effective, I thought, as I had a
drink with Adrian in an Art Nouveau pavilion café on the estate, in summoning
up the charged, elevated eclecticism of the 1920s art-world zietgeist. While my tastes in painting might prefer a
Bougueraeu to a Khalo, my romantic Muse finds itself quite at home stepping
between peacocks in a 16th-century castle repurposed to the patronage of
left-wing socialist art in a swirling milieu of sexual pecadillos, international
fame, and notorious wealth.
Not a bad world to find behind the gate.
The museum cafe
No comments:
Post a Comment